Review of Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence

Abstract

In the first six chapters, Unger repeatedly insists that affluent people ought to give substantial amounts of money to prevent early death among children in distant lands. In the final chapter he defends a contextualist semantics for moral terminology. He acknowledges that his contextualism implies that in normal contexts of discussion it is “perfectly correct” to say that we have no obligations to the distant children. Thus the semantic theory apparently undermines the normative pronouncements that appear in the earlier chapters. I explain the conflict and consider some ways in which one might try to evade it. I claim that they all fail.